Environment Modules

Welcome to the Environment Modules open source project. The Environment
Modules package provides for the dynamic modification of a user's environment
via modulefiles.

What are Environment Modules?

Typically users initialize their environment when they log in by
setting environment information for every application they will reference
during the session. The Environment Modules package is a tool that simplify
shell initialization and lets users easily modify their environment during
the session with modulefiles.

Each modulefile contains the information needed to configure the shell for
an application. Once the Modules package is initialized, the environment
can be modified on a per-module basis using the module command which
interprets modulefiles. Typically modulefiles instruct the module command
to alter or set shell environment variables such as PATH, MANPATH, etc.
modulefiles may be shared by many users on a system and users may have
their own collection to supplement or replace the shared modulefiles.

Modules can be loaded and unloaded dynamically
and atomically, in an
clean fashion. All popular shells are supported, including
bash, ksh, zsh, sh,
csh, tcsh, fish, as well as some scripting languages
such as perl, ruby, tcl and python.

Modules are useful in managing different versions of applications.
Modules can also be bundled into metamodules that will load an entire
suite of different applications.

Talks

Related tools

Flavours is a
wrapper built on top of Modules C-version to simplify the organization and
presentation of software that requiring multiple builds against different
compilers, MPI libraries, processor architectures, etc. This package is
written and maintained by Mark Dixon.

Env2 is a Perl script
to convert environment variables between scripting languages. For example,
convert a csh setup script to bash or the other way around. Supports bash,
csh, ksh, modulecmd, perl, plist,
sh, tclsh, tcsh, vim, yaml
and zsh. This package is written and maintained by David C. Black.

Software Collections is a
Red Hat project that enables you to build and concurrently install multiple
RPM versions of the same components on your system, without impacting the
system versions of the RPM packages installed from your distribution. Once
installed a software collection is enabled with the scl command
that relies on Modules for the user environment setup.